throwaway98121

Illegals? You mean undocumented residents?

Personally I don’t think the president has any strong points other than being a racist, misogenoist, pathological liar, and narcissist.

How is a reddit thread considered the source of truth? I know we have daily posts about Amazon getting too large, but this is getting kind of ridiculous.

The forced attrition is no surprise. I’m in Seattle and considering the thousands and thousands of people they were hiring in recent years, it would be impossible to not get the bottom of the barrel devs who can pass algorithm problems but fail to work independently or deliver at all.

Is there a legitimate security concern or is it that Huawei is a potential threat to companies here in the US who sell similar or same products for far more?

Call me pessimistic, but anytime a government tells me something is a national security threat, my b.s. detector starts to go off.

Not to go completely on a tangent, but the goals of the US republic are to protect its elite. Everything else is just a distraction, IMO.

I don't know if they’re a terrible publisher, and honestly I’ve never written a book.

I downloaded a picture book for my son that was Amazon published.

I remember this because it was free on prime day and it was one of the huge banners on their page that worked even when the site wasn’t working. So they do advertise the books they publish.

How is it cheaper? If Amazon has to decide to promote item A instead of the next Kindle reader or some other product, there’s certainly an opportunity cost. To blanketly state it absolutely costs less is too naive and merely an assumption.

Everything you described sounds like blatant corruption or at minimum, extreme selfishness. Im not a fan of conservative politics (grew up in conservative areas), but what you describe sounds like the batshit crazy end of the other side of the spectrum.

Are you feeling okay?

Which companies with a large footprint don’t spend big on lobbying efforts? I’m sorry but why is this news? Is it particularly nefarious or even noteworthy at all?

No offense to op, but this is clickbait garbage.

I was recently in SF for the first time to attend QCon. Beautiful city with a lot of character and culture IMO.

I made the mistake of taking an Uber from my hotel, about 1 mile away from the convention center. Traffic is horrendously bad and it took about 40 minutes to go one mile. It did give me a great opportunity to sit back and just sight see some buildings and what not for 40 min.

For the week I was there, I walked a lot after the conference each day to see the city. The thing that really stuck out was there was no new construction and certainly no high rises. Well of course, why wouldn’t prices go up then?

The roads were also pretty atrocious. I understand taxes are high. What exactly do they spend tax dollars on? Serious question.

I’d certainly would like to visit again but honestly it’s not a place I’d want to live in.

Is this news or is it merely the daily “lets have the hive mind attack ${fill_in_tech_company_here}”?

We get these posts just about every day about why some tech company is horrible. It’s not why I personally come to hacker news to get indoctrinated with the political biases of these organizations. The quality of this site is decreasing because of this garbage.

These are good reasons, but how many projects really have such a need to scale, for example?

If you have let’s say a massive developer organization, some level of abstraction so you don’t have to manage provisioning servers/hosts and invest time in undifferentiated (no or low value add) activities is great.

The cost of these function as a service solutions is very high though, even in those scenarios, at least from my own experience.

A lot of people rush to these solutions and CTOs blindly sign off without realizing it’s just added tech debt.

How many apps require web storage? Are there sufficient requirements to implement web workers or service workers?

Go back to the core design and simplify it. Keep what you need and everything else is noise.

My point was people pick the new and coming framework and it turns into tech debt. If development was more requirement driven, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

There’s generally an anti Amazon post here often, especially so when Amazons stock starts trending upwards.

I don’t have problems when I shop on Amazon, and their instant video collection let us cut cable. We do have a boomerang subscription for another $5 a month for the kids. Last Christmas, we did purchase All Clad cookware, and one of the items was damaged, like literally a hairline crack. I called amazon and they sent the replacement with next day delivery. Pain in the ass but the only defective product I’ve had from them since 2015.

Imo there’s generally an anti Amazon article by one of these media sites each week. I’m not sure how true it is the writing are, but to say Amazon ruined internet shopping sounds pretty inaccurate and laughable. I grew up in Bellevue, WA but many years ago left for the Midwest. I’m not sure if there are some better services that blow Amazon out of the water used by these media, east/west coast elitists or if it’s just the anti corporate hate train of smearing companies that get too large and founders get too rich.

I suspect Amazon has millions of shoppers each day and these threads just turn into the angriest crowd of the 100 or folks who didn’t like their experience. Out of millions of shoppers per day, a hundred or even a few thousand angry customers are a rounding error and probably well within their customer satisfaction metrics. Hence, Amazon doesn’t change how they sell things or their delivery promises.

I find front end development extremely boring. Just my personal opinion. So you make another web page using a new framework. So what? How is it better or more valuable than what you could have built 5 years ago? Did you discover a framework that gives you faster time to market? Is it easier to support because it’s a smaller code base and multi platform? Is the performance that much better? Did some Ab testing really prove to you that you need to optimize load times because millisecond scale differences impact dollar value? You could have and that could perfectly justify a new set of frameworks that solve those use cases. The majority of the time in my experience, people just move from one toolkit to another not because they evaluated requirements or pain points and found something truly better but because it’s the cool new thing. It all ends up being garbage tech debt.

Building a native application with native APIs using JavaScript sounds interesting. Okay, you built another user interface. How many of these do we need to build? How many apps does the typical user have installed or even use among the ones they did install?

I remember recently turning on some tutorial for a web app that was linked from HN. Angular on the front end, node on the backend, framework B for writing tests, framework C for running them, some other tool for the build process. Another tool or plugin for minification. Okay great. You know the frameworks of the month. Congrats.

I learned HTML back in late 90s in grade school and went on to build PHP apps in the early 2000s for my Unreal clan. By college, I supported a stack for my university written in CakePHP. I remember using django for a class project in my CS program. My first job out of college, there was a tangled mess of asp.net, .NET web MVC and .NET web apis. My next company, there was a ton of stuff in Spring and various APIs using jersey.

Honestly, none of the real value was in any of the web apps. The value was in the backend logic (if there was any significant business logic at all) and more so in data and real system design, balancing between function, redundancy, resiliency, extensibility, and some notion of scalability depending on who the customer was and what expected or unexpected scenarios could arise and how our systems would behave.

Unfortunately I see too many folks caught up in the framework of the week or framework of the month when there’s so much more depth if you’re willing to explore.

My personal opinion based on what I know.

Grouping these companies together as big tech and these brushing broad strokes isn’t helpful. It just seems like we’re picking the next bogeyman, sort of like how all the oil companies were grouped together, even though there were specific bad actors.

It distorts the real issues and almost emboldens the other side who now work collectively to dismiss you as a tin foil conspiracy peddler.

In my opinion, Facebook has some real issues with privacy and how they are able to legally provide a service that has taken the worst aspects of society and amplified them 1000x. Politics are more cancerous than ever. People have been murdered because of the misinformation and hate speech propaganda. Meanwhile, one of my best friends who works at FB as a senior engineer is convinced they’re changing the world for the better.

Amazon, for instance, has fueled massive inequality in the Seattle area. As far as I know, they’re not selling customer data, although from what I’ve learned, they combined technology with great ideas on how to skirt regulation.

My point being, a company like Amazon vs. Facebook - there are different issues. Grouping Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft together - its like the right wing conspiracy theories on how the Mueller investigation is a conspiracy funded by Soros, Obama, the Clintons, the Muslim brotherhood, and gays.

This isn’t helpful and it distracts from the real issues.

Those Chinese investors didn’t do anything illegal did they? Sounds like your beef should be with your own city or towns council or state government for allowing this to happen. The Chinese investors saw an opportunity and took advantage.

What blows my mind are all the folks who point at corporations and capitalism in general as being inherently “bad” and are quick to point out the effects of transplants from other countries or cities moving to their area for economic opportunity. Then these same folks also are in favor of liberal immigration policies.

The NIMBY mentality is hypocritical.

You left Seattle but others moved in to take your place. I don’t see a negative here other than you’re upset that others are successful. You feel like you are entitled to live in Seattle, and I disagree. You moved out but Rahul who came from Hyderabad has a much better quality of life in Seattle. It sucks for you, but is it inherently bad for society?

May not be allowed to use cloud today but that will likely change in the near future. FWIW, I can imagine your post in my head as an argument in favor of horses over automobiles.

What you’ve seen in 10 years was reality during that time. That speake nothing little to the future.

I always wondered how these places stay open. I judge them as fronts for cleaning up dirty money.

Suffering financially has a pretty wide band. If you make $100k but only save $100 or save nothing, I’d say your suffering financially.

If you work minimum wage and have a spouse or even just kids to support, 20% of $20 isn’t chump change. You have to make every penny count. You’re in an extremely difficult position.

I signed up to the WSJ recently. Paid for it for one month and then decided I didn’t like their reporting, especially some things which I felt are dishonest or opinion pieces which were highly offensive and discriminatory points of views.

Anyway, you can’t cancel online. You have to physically call a number. I ended up putting it off just until the day before they were going to charge me again. Seriously, FU wsj.

The author’s thesis, to my understanding, is that because big tech isn’t trading at a huge premium that it was before, it is now dead. This is a huge stretch and clickbait garbage if I can be honest.

I mostly buy index funds but do have positions in Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. I’m net positive on all of them. I think Apple and FB are the only ones I’m in red on, and only for what I bought in them last year.

Big tech is far from dead. I’m by no means an expert, but Microsoft is solid all the way around. On paper at least, FB is actually very strong, despite the negative press (which they deserve IMO), Amazon has been becoming more and more profitable, etc.

No side projects. The little time I have outside of work and family, I read or browse hacker news before falling asleep. I did take vacation recently and play The Witcher 3, which ruined gaming for me.

I have about $200k spread thoughout some index funds and individual stocks that all pay dividends in my post tax accounts. I reinvest all that income and the taxes are kind of annoying to deal with, but’s it’s better than nothing.

I also have a high yield savings account. A big chunk of my total cash is tied up here because I’d rather stay liquid. I think the rate is now 2% annual or just north of. It gets me $300 a month. I just save it and let it grow, aside from taxes on the interest.

All these things are cool but that’s about it. Sure you can call this innovation, but Apple raised the bar high enough where Apple Pay or Apple Maps isn’t something that would make me go out and drop $1000 on a device.

HomePod isn’t a great device, at least the last generation that we bought. I use Samsung Pay and have no need for Apple Pay. I don’t wear a watch because I have a phone that tells me the time among other things.

Again, I’m not crapping on the engineers who worked these things, but these tiny products are nothing compared to the paradigm shifts of iTunes, the iPhone, etc.

I’ve held on to half my RSUs and immediately sold the second half over the past 8 years. In my situation, I already have a diversified portfolio. Keeping those RSUs falls within my risk threshold.

That’s incredibly ignorant that without knowing people’s situation, you brush it off as reckless behavior.

He completely lost me here.

>Of course, if the problem is just inequality, then that’s one case where I would say there’s all sorts of inequality, so why is that actually something that is so bad the government needs to do something about it? Again, it’s different if you have people starving to death versus not being happy that they’re getting paid 5 percent less than what they ought to be getting paid.

Okay so because there is inequality and some dimensions are worse than other, government shouldn’t do anything about anything.

And if you’re not a privileged elite male who was educated, that’s just too bad because you are not the only one. The government should just leave everyone alone, and if some people are discriminated against, then his study on incomes of black males is enough to refute any kind of inequality in the workplace (or anywhere else for that matter).

I’m trying to paraphrase what I understood. How does anyone, regardless of their political biases, respect this guy or his “intellect”? I know I sound harsh, but please enlighten me.

For the record, I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative.

I disagree. Jobs gave us iTunes, iPod, iPhone. These were revolutionary devices IMO. Sure MP3 players existed before, but the customer experience made me feel, “wow I need this!”

I haven’t felt that way in a while. There’s nothing really new that apple is doing at the moment. Thinner devices that’s im going to wrap in a case are great. A higher resolution is nice. Deeper blacks and face recognition instead of passwords? Okay cool. Certainly not worth $1000 to me.

Don’t get me started about the MacBook Pro. Some how apple managed to take a very fine machine and in 2016 decided, “You know what? Let’s just take a massive dump on this thing and add a Touch Bar.”

Very well stated. I have an older iPad, which I think is a fantastic device, that I use for general browsing, managing my portfolio, and personal email. There’s no reason for me to upgrade other than maybe as a status symbol.

Honestly, none of my friends care how latest is my iPad, and neither do I. There’s no use case the newer version has that makes me think, “Wow, I need this in my life.” Speaking of which, combine all this with the ridiculous pricing of the new iPads, it just doesn’t make financial sense to throw away money.

I’m not sure what your sarcasm contributes to the discussion.

I think op has a fair point. If we remove our political views, we can still see that our government and politics are extremely divided. Furthermore, wealth is accumulating into the hands of a very few. What should be democratic outcomes are substantially influenced by capital and the ones who possess capital.

You could argue that our politics were always divided. I haven’t forgotten how toxic it was during the Clinton administration (again, I’m not blaming either party or taking sides).

What’s making it worse today is with access to the internet and social media, everything is amplified times 100. Spreading misinformation is a lot easier and we’re dealing with adversarial nation states exploiting that to our detriment.

Personally, I don’t think this is sustainable in the long term.

Now- let me mix in my more biased opinions. In the country my parents immigrated from, doing things such as jailing or threatening to jail your political opponents, labeling all your political opponents as corrupt, criminals, etc was a common thing.

Over time, it only got worse over there. We are seeing those authoritarian tendencies here, and that’s the real terrifying part.

Why anyone would spend $40K plus on a vehicle baffles me, but that being said, if the article is accurate, good on Tesla for being such a rival to the other established brands against all odds.

I think it’s problematic. The fact it’s only censored inside Saudi Arabia means it doesn’t impact me directly. That being said, as the saudis continue investing in the west, in social media, in other Silicon Valley start ups, I don’t want there to be any chance these traditions (which I consider oppression) could seep up into my or my children’s way of life.